A New Beginning

Posted on Sun May 27th, 2018 @ 6:23pm by Captain Remas McDonald & Lieutenant Commander Shadi Zatra
Edited on on Sun Jun 3rd, 2018 @ 12:44am

2,600 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: S1:3: Myriad Problems
Location: Map Room
Timeline: MD 1 14.00

The small fleet of Starfleet vessel’s dropped out of warp in a staggered formation. First came the Traveller, her sensors reaching out into the vastness to chase away shadows and threats. Gravity sensors picked up the planetary class bodies, a trio of gas giants, a few rocky worlds and the usually handful of moons.

Later analysis would show the rocky worlds were super heated airless rocks, blasted to cinders by the solar wind of a bright yellow primary. But the confectionary colour gas giants showed some promises, with a handful of them showing the diffused bubbles of thick atmospheres shrouding them.

Once assured its surroundings were not littered with threats, both natural and artificial, the trio of drone freighters and the colony barge warped out to her aft. The freighters began to expand long booms from their sides, the masts studded with sensors and recording instruments as they began to drudgery work of data collection. The barge moved closer to the Traveller, its sensors as active as the more modern exploration ships like a field mouse chasing after shadows.

But for the time being, there was no need to panic. Though in short order Remas would give many people such cause.

+++

“You are not imagining the wings,” Remas said with a grin as he gestured to the holographic ship model rotating in the air of the map room. Within the projection a small model of the Traveller spun lazily, but you would not be faulted for imaging it to be another ship entirely. There was its sharply angled saucer section, the low slug trailing length of her warp nacelles, and the sleek spoiler like sensor pod perched above.

And a pair of narrow swept back wings.

The appeared on the model to be attached to the nacelle pylons, angled back so their narrow trailing edges were parallel to the tips of her nacelles. They looked far to narrow, far to weak, and utterly defeated by a sharp turn.

“We’ll be using them to stabilise us during our refuelling operation around the inner most gas giant,” Remas explained, gesturing to the hologram as it shifted to a system map. The two outer gas giants were temperamental icy diva’s screaming into the high end of the EM spectrum, but the inner gas giant rested just on the cusp of the Goldilocks Zone. It also had the most moons, and its storming skies were coloured in stark bands of brilliant reds and white.

“Should be a simple enough operation, done Cloud Dancing plenty of times as a youth,” Remas said to the assembled crew. “Any questions?”

"I like it." Vic said, he was a simple man. He liked fighting, he liked women, he liked bbq and he definitely liked the Traveller getting a pair of wings, "Though from practical standpoint, not only do they make easy targets they also might disrupt our firing arcs for the weapons." practicality always ruined the fun.

"Thats why they are temporary," Remas made an opening hand gesture to the hologram, and the image changed on command to the candy coloured gas giant they were powering towards. "The Traveller will spend a day in orbit fitting her wings, and then we'll do as the great Rish Cloud Dancer's have done for nearly three centuries: we'll dive through the gas giants upper atmosphere and use the ramscoops to accumulate reaction mass for the reactor. A gas giant like that one should have plenty of helium 3 and volatile hydrocarbon's that we can use. Once we're done the wings will be dismantled until they're needed again, or ejected if needs be."

Remas turned his attention to his Chief Science Officer and his Engineer.

"Dr Kuan, Chief Zhuri: I want you working hand in hand to map out the richest deposits for us to fly through. Obviously away from any storm's if you can help, and preferably as far from the planet's poles as we can manage," he said with a smile. "During testing in the Alpha Quadrant the USS Pathfinder, the Long Jump Project test bed ship, suffered a major mishap when she flew through a patch of winter weather over Saturns southern pole. I don't think losing the sensor pod is a good enough trade for fuel."

"I don't see that being a problem," Dr Kuan said, looking at Ari with a nod.

Arivek barely looked up from the PADD in his hand. He quickly nodded, though he wasn't 100% sure what he was agreeing too. His attention turned back to the tablet and he had checked out from the conversation once again.

"As for the rest of us, general repairs, scut work, and tightening down the hatches. If this was a Rish Cloud Dancer I'd be getting you thoroughly wasted in case tomorrow we get to make an account of ourselves to them that went before us," Remas grinned. "I'll just have to make it a tradition for the next pit stop we make to fill up the gas tanks. Today we do work, the day after tomorrow we begin exploring. Any questions?"

Shadi absently clicked her prosthetic foot on the floor with a grating clack-clack-clack. Her bulbous eyes never looked away from the gas giants.

"Is there a reason the entire ship needs to dive through the devil's anus?" she asked at length. "Couldn't the wings be attached to some shuttles or runabouts? Even if they had to make more than one dive, it would be less risssky."

"The wings are over a hundred meters from tip to root, they'd not make fit sails for a shuttle. And the risk is in the trade-off: the Traveller has more powerful inertial dampeners and engines than a shuttle, not to mention a large magnetic scoop for collection. A shuttle would need to spend a week to collect as much as we'd make in a single pass," Remas said but nodded at Shadi. "Though after this refuelling mission I'd be pleased to look into alternatives. Maybe we could pump water out of one of the ice moons orbiting the gas giants?"

Rena wasn't an engineer. Even with lifetimes of memories to draw from, the stuff never really made sense to her. So to be in this briefing about some wing modification was about as interesting to her as watching grass grow. Her attempts to at least pretend to be interested waned as she spent more and more time staring at the tablet in her hands, getting work done. It took some time to get Shadi sober again, and the Trill made a note in her record for future reference. She would admit, though, that Shadi's regeneration was going by well, practically exceptional. She had also been indirectly working with the science department to get more information on the Malignant Matter, or whatever the hell they decided to call it.

Daani sat quietly nearer the back of the room. If there were curious looks sent her way, she ignored them in favour of studying the padd in one tattooed hand. Since her talk with the captain, the guards on her room had been removed, and the replicator unlocked enough to provide a uniform and other necessities. She was amused to find that it was still locked to anything with a sharp edge. A sensible precaution, one she’d have insisted on herself were she in the position to make such demands.

But she wasn’t, nor was she in a position to have any opinion on the Traveller’s new wings. Instead she concentrated on sifting through all the information that had already been collected on their new environment, filtering through it for anything that might be useful or warn of an upcoming danger.

The warning flag arrived on Daani's PADD the same instant the warning lights in the map room flickered from day lighting to amber strobing.

"Captain, this is the bridge. We've just detected a starship on sensors."

Remas looked at the eyes around the table, and tapped the tables comm unit.

"What vector did it arrive on," he said. His voice carried the hope it came from within Messier 4, and was not the remains of a demon chasing them in from the wilds of intergalactic space.

"No, sir I...I mean it just appeared. Centre of the system, just above the north magnetic pole of the system's star," the officer of the watch said over the comm. "It's on an intercept vector at full impulse. Estimated zero-zero intercept with us will be around the time we enter the orbit of the gas giant."

"Understood, hold us study and await further instructions. Update us if anything changes," Remas said and deactivated the comm. "Well...seems we will be having visitors."

"Battle stations!" Shadi cried, then looked down at her prosthetic leg. "Or... yellow alert?"

"I think yellow alert for the time being," Remas chided as kindly as he could. "After all, for all, we know this system is claimed by someone as part of their territory. If a strange collection of vessels arrived in Leonis Eta without warning not forty light years from Sol, Starfleet would send someone to check up on the new arrivals. Folk would talk otherwise."

He eyed Victor.

"But just in case, run the weapons arrays the bow pulse cannons through a diagnostic. We won't arrive at the gas giant for five more hours, time enough to make sure we can make a good accounting of ourselves should it come to it," he said after glancing at the holo map of the system.

"Diagnostics were already started at the beginning of Alpha shift sir, gotta keep the help busy somehow." Vic said with a chuckle, he stopped then glanced at Danni. Though he'd been told to back down he still didn't quite feel comfortable around her call it a fight or flight response, and he wasn't one to backdown.

"Miss Black. I know your department is little more than closet space at the moment, but no time like the present for it to start paying for its seat at the table." Remas again made an odd gesture over the holo table with on hand, and again the computer reacted to it. This time the display floating above the table turned into a trio of spire-like towers held together at their base by filagree spars and elaborate buttresses. Where the tree towers did not meet circular devices glowered viciously, appearing to propel what looked like a gothic castle through space.

"Use every passive means of scanning we have to gain as much intelligence as possible about our new neighbours. Even knowing what sort of drive emissions come out of that vessel might tell us something useful," he instructed and then nodded at Shadi. "Chief Zatra can assist you in transferring and interpreting the data. And in doing so you can both get acquainted with the Travellers ECM suite. If it says 'Property of SFMC' just ignore it. It's a holdover from the time a Ferengi merchant tried to Mal Ware Bomb a Starbase into submission whilst I was on shore leave. Might do us well if our friends out there try to get to know us a little too well."

"Consider it done," Shadi said with an affirmative nod.

“Of course,” Danni added her own nod, tempted to wink at Reynolds when she felt his gaze on her but resisted. It wouldn’t do to stir the pot when tensions were running high. While she’d never really played well with others unless it was on a battlefield, she wasn’t THAT much of an ass.

She looked up and nodded to Shadi... a professional courtesy. She’d never worked with a saurian before, but she’d ensured she’d read through the files she could access on the crew as soon as Remas had given her the role he had. You never knew when someone else’s experience and skillset would be useful, and Shadi certainly seemed to be an interesting figure.

"Like that can do attitude. As for the rest of us: Dr Kal I would appreciate your team giving the Travellers biofilters a once over. New guests tend to bring guests. Remind me to tell you the tale about the fun year as a teen I spent hunting down Rigellian roaches on my father's Homesteader during the long trek to Dronzel VI," he chuckled.

Rena raised a brow at the comment but nodded. "After the... whatever the hell you all decided to call it, the biofilters were cleaned so well that they looked newer than the day they were installed, but we'll go over it again." Thankful to finally be able to do something, she stood from her chair and promptly left, the conversation to her staff beginning with "Run another diagnostic on the..." before the doors shut behind her.

"Chief Zhuri I'd appreciate if you would ensure all preparations for the Travellers metamorphosis into a bird be put on hold. Might be a thought to ready our damage control teams just in case-" Remas had started talking without looking, and was not shocked in the least to find Ari still nose down in a PADD. He prompted. "Ari?"

Arivek looked up, not trying to mask the annoyance he felt at being interrupted, yet again. "Yea yea, got it," he said, turning his face back into the PADD.

"While I'm teaching your factotum how to do sensors sweeps, Captain," Shadi interjected, noting the engineer's behavior stunk even worse than his heinous smell, "maybe sssomeone in Science can go over the data collected from the derelict and help me plug it into the Universal Translator to see if anything sticks."

"I don't really see what sort of bearing an extragalactic civilisation has to do with mysterious starships appearing out of suns. But I'd be a foolish scientist to discount any avenue," Dr Kuan said with a slight nod of her head. "We've already fed the grand sum total of our work on the Morning Star Empire's language. At first pass, it appears to be twenty-four separate language bases, possibly the linguistic remanents of other species who were absorbed or admitted into the Empire. Or some sort of caste system denoted by language, similar to the Bajoran high and low tongues. The...artificial intelligence we salvaged from the Ark, Clee'san is its name, has not been overly illuminating on this point."

"Clee'san is a guest to us, not a data PADD to be tapped and prodded," Remas said guardedly. "But, it might be wise to ask questions once we know more. Might well be these inquisitive spacers are descendants of her crew?"

"Very well," Shadi hissed with her forked tongue. "Bared talons it is then."

Remas imagined putting Shadi in a shirt with the message 'We come in peace!' stencilled on it. The image lasted as long as Remas thought it might take for Shadi to ripped it off of her self.

"Aye, something like that," he said with a smile.

He then looked around the table, eyes locking with each and every member of his command team.

"This will set the tone for us, how we interact with the natives of Messier 4. How we pull this off will become how everyone see's us. We won't have an exit from this volume of space for a few years now, so we cannot afford to make an enemy," he stressed. "But, I will not trade our lives for peace. Let us be about it."

 

RSS Feed